Notes for: July 13, 2010
France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had a traumatic effect on the country’s musical as well as its political life. Even before the war French composers had become increasingly restive under the century-old Austro-German domination of European music. Now the sight of Prussian soldiers marching down the Champs Élysées spurred their search for a French musical style to replace what they considered crushing German formalism.
The primary sponsor of this French musical renaissance was the Société Nationale de Musique Français, founded by Camille Saint-Saëns in February, 1871, a few days before the German occupation of Paris. With the motto Ars Gallica, the Society over the next quarter-century nurtured a new generation of “Gallic” composers – notably, Vincent D’Indy, Éduard Lalo, Henri Duparc, Emmanuel Chabrier and Gabriel Fauré. These men developed a new French idiom with an emphasis on finesse, delicacy and nuance, and thus laid the groundwork for the musical impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Fauré was unquestionably the most important figure in this transitional period, serving as the Society’s secretary and concert manager. As a young composer and organist, he had enlisted in the light infantry during the war and had taken part in the unsuccessful effort to raise the German siege of Paris. On his discharge in March, 1871, he found in the Society a ready sponsor for his own quest for originality. Heretofore mainly a composer of songs, in the next few years he produced for the Society’s audiences three instrumental masterpieces – a violin sonata, a ballade for piano, and the piano quartet we hear this evening.
The piano quartet, completed in 1879, exhibits the highly personalized idiom that was to mark Fauré’s instrumental music for the next half-century. That style is characterized by three elements:
These elements are tied together with a sense of elegance and craftsmanship that were part of the French tradition that Fauré inherited and marked with his own stamp.
The first movement opens with the strings stating the strong main theme in unison, but Fauré promptly transforms it into a lovely, at times, dreamy melody. An undulating subsidiary theme is presented by the viola and is imitated by the other instruments. Fauré follows traditional sonata form in developing the two themes and bringing them back for the usual recapitulation and coda.
The elements of Fauré’s style cited above reach their high point in the second movement scherzo. The movement opens with six measures of pizzicato chords in 6/8 rhythm. The piano then plays a fragmented theme in single notes and three-measure phrases. The balance of the main section consists of a playful treatment of these materials in alternating 6/8 and 2/4 meter. The trio continues the contrasting use of piano and strings, the latter playing with mutes and highly expressive harmonies. The result is a scherzo as unique in its own way as Mendelssohn’s better known excursions into fairyland.
The deeply emotional third movement has an undercurrent of melancholy. It is organized in A-B-A form, with the themes of both sections built on rising scale fragments. A particularly elaborate piano part leads to the return of the opening section.
Fauré ties the work together by giving the principal theme of the fourth movement the intensity and rhythmic pattern of the first movement and the rising-scale contour of the second. The viola presents an agitated second theme. The development culminates in an impassioned climax, the themes are recapitulated, and the quartet ends with a brilliant coda.
Notes for: July 11, 2017
Aaron Copland described Fauré’s music as possessing “all the earmarks of the French temperament: harmonic sensitivity, impeccable taste, classic restraint, and a love of clear lines and well-made proportions.” He might also have mentioned Fauré’s harmonic and melodic innovations. While the scale of many of Fauré’s compositions is relatively small and intimate, his strikingly original ideas had an outsized impact on musical development in the first part of the 20th century, especially through his students Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger.
All of Fauré’s strengths and the sources of his appeal are on display in his early Piano Quartet in C Minor. Fauré wrote it at a moment of crisis in his life. After a five-year courtship, he had become engaged to Marianne Viardot, the beautiful daughter of a prominent musical family. Marianne soon ended the engagement, perhaps because the family was displeased that Gabriel wanted to write chamber music instead of grand opera. “Perhaps the break was not a bad thing for me,” Fauré would later write. “The Viardot family might have deflected me from my proper path.” This quartet is proof that he took the right path. It is elegant and spirited, featuring rich, melodic lines, supple rhythms, rapid but nuanced modulations, and subtle, often modal harmonies.
The tripartite first movement, Allegro molto moderato, opens vigorously, with strings playing the robust, modal first theme in unison while the piano adds an off-the-beat rhythm. At once the character of this first theme softens, after which a lyrical second theme is introduced by the viola. In a characteristic technique, Fauré modulates these themes in subtle steps, up and down. The first theme provides the material for a gentle, flowing development that ends with a brief stormy passage and a return to the forceful character of the opening. After another transformation, the more delicate character prevails, and the movement appears to waft away. It’s a perfect lead-in to the second-movement Scherzo, a merry, gossamer, very French confection featuring pizzicato chords, an airy, syncopated melody, and shifting meters. In the change-of-pace trio, muted chords in the strings carry the melody over the piano’s arpeggios.
With the elegiac Adagio, Fauré turns from playful to melancholy – perhaps a reflection of distress over the broken engagement. The movement is built around two rising themes, the first dark and solemn, the second more expansive and contemplative. While it is the second subject, yearning and nostalgic, that is elaborated upon, it is the mood of the darker first theme that begins and ends this emotionally intense movement. Restless piano arpeggios introduce an electric Allegro molto finale. Filled with rapid shifts in rhythm and mood, the movement melds inexhaustible energy with lyrical grace as it rushes to a triumphant conclusion.